Nonfiction

The day is clear with light, cool winds blowing from the west.  I launch my kayak from a sandy beach on the edge of Crane Prairie Reservoir. It is a large lake, blue and diamond-studded when the wind blows, a glass mirror when it doesn’t. Its shore is twenty-two miles in length, most of which …

from the Jeopardy! category “Acronyms & Mnemonics:” You never really understood your generation’s obsession with space: not Star Wars, not Star Trek (the two of which you always confused), & certainly not actual space. Why would anyone want to go there—where the tethers were givens, more literal & restrictive than any tethers that bound you …

After my husband’s death, grief blinded me, perhaps, mercifully, so that I could not see how it would strip from me even the simplest of pleasures. In the spring, when once I had wandered the forest still wet with rain, and greedily plucked wild chanterelles, I found myself walking past them, leaving them to the …

Where is home? At the corner of Union St. and Clinton Ave., where a cream colonial house sits on an acre of lush grass. Where, amidst aged black oaks and red maples, a nascent Japanese cherry tree buds along the yard’s back edge. Planted by my father in honor of my birth, our timelines expand …

Winner of the 2022 “Annie Dillard Award” in Nonfiction In 1995, Byron Kim, a Brooklyn based contemporary artist, attempted to paint his childhood home when he realized he could not recall its exact color. He knew it was pink, but he couldn’t remember if the house was the color of a tongue or the pale …

The summer I first remember the salps arriving, I was eleven.  The sea grew thick with them. Overnight, illuminated by ripples of phosphorescence, the tide had pulled and spread the clear bodies along the Long Island coast. Jelly sacks the size of dimes, the waves piled them on the shore. I found them the next …

The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.

In 2019, scientists at the New England Aquarium in Boston published a paper on chronic illness in whales by studying and measuring the stress hormones left behind on baleen plates. While I lack a push-broom mouth for filter-feeding, my teeth show the wreckage of the neglect and trauma I endured as a child. My CPTSD is well medicated, but still: so much stress, a lifetime of fighting. Research clearly shows that children who grow up with chronic abuse are more likely to develop chronic health problems as adults. After years of reading about trauma, I have finally aged into the statistic I’ve been destined for since childhood.

Most surprising of all were your hands; they never carried a fleck of dirt or dust. Your fingernails might have been painted by da Vinci, and when you curled your hand around a cup, your index finger protruded over the top like a blue heron down on her fishing-luck, but still wavering there over the liquid.

It’s a myth our nails keep growing after we die. I remember my mother’s final manicure, a hot pink gel that didn’t even chip when she fell on her concrete porch, still looked perfect a week later when we laid her in her coffin.  At the hospital, nobody told us she was dying.